Sugimoto’s Lightning Field

Hiroshi Sugimoto is often venerated as a Zen master of film photography. But in “The Day After,” an exhibition that opened Nov. 6 at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea, he has assumed a new persona — that of a wild and visionary scientist.

The show focuses on Mr. Sugimoto’s latest work: a series of monumental “Lightning Field” photographs, all from last year, that seem to sizzle with majestic lightning bolts. Marked by incandescent whites, velvety blacks and subtle textural detail, they suggest the birth of stars and planets.

These photographs are the largest that Mr. Sugimoto has ever made, and they took him some four years of intensive research to perfect. “I have always been curious about science,” he said in a recent interview at his Chelsea studio. “But now it’s getting very serious.”